"How to be a little bit in helplessness? / To cover the soul with dried flowers, / to add the sound of a stone to the word, / to talk to it from the heart" - the poetic composition Flight of the Dragonfly was completed by Jaromír Zelenka last winter. Milan Bobysud publishes his Diary-haiku in the spring RR in excerpts. A selection of poetry by the contemporary Latvian poet Semjon Chanin has been translated by Libuše Bělunková, with commentary by Tomáš Glanc. Jaromír Typlt returns to the legacy of the writer Josef Kocourek on the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of his untimely death with a large block of previously unpublished texts - survey responses, memoirs and prose, accompanied by photographs.
He also introduces another of the artists of art brut: "Whoever and whatever he has focused on so far, Ladislav Svoboda has let it gradually and without haste - his paintings are created in months rather than weeks - 'dissolve' in a complex, carefully worked-out tangle of lines. A painting is, after all, a way of immortalising something: to stop it for eternity." Radmila Polzerová is devoted to embroidered images, and finds inspiration for them in her work at the porter's lodge of the Prague Hussite Theological Faculty of Charles University, as Josef Rauvolf reveals in the accompanying text. Tattooing also has a lot in common with embroidery, which is something that David Dolenský, a cartoonist and illustrator, is intensively involved in, and his aesthetic inspiration is the work of the masters from the old tattoo studios. Tattooing a taut calf can almost be compared to drawing, while the furrowing of the machine in the soft parts is closer to embroidery in terms of time."
"Never was lying so much as now. Nor so brazenly, systematically and persistently," wrote Alexandre Koyré as early as 1943 at the beginning of his essay Reflections on Lying, translated and commented on for RR by Jean-Gaspard Páleníček. In the spring issue of RR we also publish an excerpt from the book Fenced Time (Memoirs of a Political Prisoner), the focus of which is an interview between his son and father, Jan Wiendle, and František Wiendle, a participant in the Second and Third Czechoslovak Resistance and a political prisoner for many years, who turned ninety-nine on 31 December: "It was a clear signal for us when Jan Masaryk was thrown out of the window on 10 March 1948. We had no doubt then that it was murder. After discussing it with my father, we called a meeting in our apartment of people with whom we had good experience during the wartime resistance. (...) Together we decided that we had to make at least some trouble for the Communist Party, that it was simply not possible for the Communists to get away with the coup." Did they consider the very likely serious risks? "The key was to do something concrete against the Bolsheviks, I don't know that they ever doubted or considered the risk out loud at home."
The columns continue steadily in this year's edition: this time the series on small publishers features the Triad, and the Ateliers series features the workplace of Václav Sokol. The bohemian and writer Xavier Galmiche contributed to the Seven section, revealing his "subtle obsession", which is the search for a double.
This issue also concludes with a critical Couleur, focusing on a reflection of selected current events from the world of literature, visual arts, philosophy, theatre and society. Three texts belong to three personalities who left this world at the end of last year: Marga Goetz-Stankiewicz, Petr Rezko and Olaf Hanel.
Czech edition